Press Release

For immediate release. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 12, 2007 UTC - It went well into the night, it was full of tension and suspense, but when Google finally

Message 1 of 14
, Apr 12, 2007

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For immediate release.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 12, 2007 UTC - It went well into the
night, it was full of tension and suspense, but when Google finally
revealed the list of accepted students to this year's Summer of Code, it
was good news for panoramic photography.

This is the biggest Summer of Code ever and Google has shown tremendous
generosity by massively increasing the number of accepted applicants -
from 600 (last year) to 800 (this year's budget), then to 900 during
preliminary allocation to end up at "over 900 from a pool of over 3,000
student and nearly 6,200 applications". [1]

Following up on an idea of Pablo d'Angelo (the initiator of hugin),
Yuval Levy set in motion a team effort to build a mentoring organization
[2] with recognized experts from the community and beyond.

This community effort [3] was recognized by Google who accepted the
hugin/panotools bid to be one of 131 accredited mentoring organization
(out of over 300 applications) in the same league as established open
source projects such as MySQL, Mozilla, Drupal and FreeBSD.

The following projects are scheduled for completition by August 31 [4]:

Pedro Alonso from Spain, mentored by Herbert Bay from Switzerland, will
develop a new algorythm to identify better control points, so critical
to the stitching process [5]

Ippei Ukai from Japan currently in Scotland, mentored by Yuval Levy from
Israel currently in Canada, will produce a new user interface to make
this versatile tools even easier to use on multiple platforms
(Windows/Mac/Linux/Unix) [6]

Jing Jin from USA, mentored by Pablo d'Angelo from Germany, will develop
a robust blending algorithm to eliminate ghosting in HDR panoramas to
widen the range of applications for the HDR technique beyond the
perfectly still scenes [7]

Mohammad Shahiduzzaman from Bangladesh, mentored by John Cupitt from UK,
will look at the current bottleneck in panorama rendering to enable
efficient processing of very large images [8]

Leon Monctezuma from Mexico, mentored by Aldo Hoeben from The
Netherlands, will build on the community effort started last year to
produce a modern, native, universal VR viewer to support the widest
variety of panorama formats on multiple platforms [9]

"Each of these projects has the potential to have a big impact on how we
make and use panoramas and I am thankful to Google for this great
opportunity and to all those community members who participated actively
in the inception of this initiative." said a visibly happy Yuval Levy.
"Please welcome these student's contribution to the community and
support them with all means you can afford".

A number of community support initiatives are planned throughout the
summer. Current open source code contributors can contribute over the
established developers mailing lists [10],[11],[12],[13]

ABOUT HUGIN

hugin is the most advanced open source panorama stitching solution with
unique features such as embedded chromatic aberration correction and HDR
stitching. Initiated by Pablo d'Angelo, it is further developed and
supported by a wide community of open source developers and panorama
enthusiasts. [14],[15]

ABOUT PANOTOOLS

panotools is the most versatile open source collection of tools for
perspective manipulation. Initially developed by Helmut Dersch in 1998,
it is currently supported by open source developers and used by a number
of commercial photo stitching products. [16],[17]

ABOUT GOOGLE SUMMER OF CODE TM

Google Summer of Code TM is a program that offers student developers
stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google works
with several open source, free software and technology-related groups to
identify and fund several projects over a three month period. [18],[19]

ABOUT GOOGLE INC.

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people
around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford
Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web
property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising
program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry,
provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while
enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered
in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, and
Asia. For more information, visit [20].

... Awesome, Yuval. Thank you so much for doing this for the community. Is there any chance we could get this press release posted on the wiki so that we can

Message 3 of 14
, Apr 12, 2007

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Yuval Levy wrote:

> For immediate release.
>
> MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - April 12, 2007 UTC - It went well into the
> night, it was full of tension and suspense, but when Google finally
> revealed the list of accepted students to this year's Summer of Code, it
> was good news for panoramic photography.